Their Weekend Update segment was pretty good.
One major measure of the state of the US workforce is the monthly jobs numbers put out on the first Friday of each month by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, giving the number of jobs created in the previous month as well as the unemployment rate. This initial data is based on survey results reported by employers and is thus rough. In the next two months, the numbers are revised based on more thorough collection of data and then after the end of the year, a final report is published
When the report for August 2025 showed terrible numbers, Trump fired the commissioner of the bureau alleging (without evidence of course) that this career professional was cooking the books to make him look bad. Since then the jobs numbers have fluctuated, as they often do, but the report for February that was published on Friday again show a gloomy picture..
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This is a very funny Mel Brooks film, a parody of westerns that was also a biting satire of racism. The plot involves a newly appointed Black sheriff to a small town, who is immediately met with prejudice. Since it is by Brooks, it of course has anachronisms and silliness running all through it.
There are so many clips that could be shown but here are just three that stand out in my mind.
I enjoyed seeing some of the the actors and the people behind the scenes of the film reminisce about it.
Kristi Noem has been fired from her cabinet position as head of the department of homeland security, capping a turbulent time that saw her treating the office as one to provide her with all manner of perks like a luxury jet to allow her to jet set all over the place for photo ops where she could strut around in a cowboy hat, and purportedly using it to enable an affair with a White House advisor. Th jet had a private boudoir with a queen size bed, even though she said it was meant to transport detainees out of the country.
The luxury executive jet sought by the DHS for immigrant deportation flights and Cabinet-level travel includes a bedroom with a queen-size bed, showers, a kitchen, four large flat-screen televisions, and a bar, according to images of the aircraft obtained by NBC News.
…Whitehouse asked, “So it is being refurbished. What kind of deportee justifies being flown out of the country in a luxury jet with a bedroom and accommodations like this?”
Even some Republicans were calling for her ouster and that may have been the trigger for Trump to dump her.
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To be named in the Epstein files is now a mark of shame, carrying with it a presumption that one is tainted by association with him and may have engaged in some truly odious practices.
Like the character in the cartoon, I would have thought that there was no way that my name would appear in the Epstein files but I was surprised to find that it actually does. How I discovered this was that there are many scientists and other well known academics mentioned in the news reports about the Epstein files so I went to the department of justice website that has a searchable database of the files released so far to check on names at random. It quickly got boring searching for well-known names, so on a whim I entered my own name and was stunned when it returned that my name was in this file.
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The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
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(I wrote this post during the time when the blog was down so it is slightly dated but here it is anyway.)
The Jeffrey Epstein fallout continues with Peter Mandelson, a Labour Party bigshot and former UK ambassador to the US, being arrested.
But the big shocker occurred when British police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, King Charles’s brother on “suspicion of misconduct in public office”. What that misconduct consisted of was not made clear (there is no indication as yet of it being part of Epstein story) but there are many possibilities because Andrew is a long-time sleazy grifter who took advantage of his privileged position to enrich himself while also cavorting with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. So there is a lot for the police to look into.
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If there was any doubt that the US and Israel are rogue, lawless states joined at the hip who are determined to create vast amounts of suffering to people all over the globe to advance their narrow personal interests, their joint attack on Iran should put those doubts to rest.
When you put a person like Trump with a child’s mentality in charge of the world’s largest military, and then pair him with a manipulative genocidal leader like Netanyahu, you have a recipe for unleashing mayhem
We do not where this will lead. All we can be sure of is that once mopre, many, many innocent people will suffer and die.
He has started a new season of shows with an examination of ICE and DHS, starting with a summary of the atrocities committed by ICE and the heroic actions of ordinary Minnesotans who came out in their thousands to protest against ICE actions.
The head of the operation Tom Homan has announced that the ICE actions have ended in Minnesota. Since these people are such liars, we’ll have to wait and see if they actually leave.
